Niels Veldhuis and Charles Lammam, responding to political criticism on a study they wrote on Canadian government stimulus attempts, have written an useful piece on why many economists think government spending tends to have a multiplier that is less than one (via fellow TSE blogger John Palmer).

In another 2009 study published in the prestigious American Economic Review, Stanford University professor John Taylor reviewed the evidence over the past decade on fiscal stimulus and concluded “there is little reliable empirical evidence that government spending is a way to end a recession or accelerate a recovery.”

A 2008 study, “What are the Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks?” by University of London professor Andrew Mountford and University of Chicago professor Harald Uhlig, assessed and compared the economic impact of various cases of deficit-financed spending, deficit-financed tax cuts and tax-financed spending from 1955 to 2000. They found that spending related measures are the weakest ways to stimulate the economy and that both deficit-financed and tax-financed spending have the effect of discouraging private investment.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which Prime Minister Harper has cited as an authority, recently surveyed fiscal stimulus initiatives in advanced and emerging economies and concluded that the average effect of discretionary fiscal policy “does not provide strong evidence of countercyclical effects.” Simply put, the IMF concluded that fiscal stimulus is generally not an effective way to combat recessions.

First, stadium construction tends to crowd out other forms of construction since construction resources can't be working on two separate projects at exactly the same time, indirect evidence for which I found in my 2002 Journal of Urban Affairsarticle on construction industry employment and wages.

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